how bad is 87 octane.......?

[IggDawg]

My lady took my Legacy today. She drives my Impreza TS now since her Impreza L got in a bit of an arguement with some trees. Yes, we are a Subaru family . Anyways, the Impreza has nearly bald tires. I hesitate to say "tires" because RE-92s don't really count as tires. We weren't planning on driving it in the winter because of this but now we're down to 2 cars so we can't be too picky. last time it snowed, she had a really tough time driving home. I told her that next time it snowed, she'd be riding in my Legacy since it has Michelin M2 WinterSport tires with plenty of tread. I consider myself a pretty god driver in the slippery stuff so it makes sense for me to take the car with less ability.

So, last time we'd gone out and I had to fill up I mentioned I'd be using 89 since someone here said they do that in the winter and it's ok. I could feel the engine pulling timing at WOT and at around 33% where I get full boost at part throttle even with the factory boost control. Anyways, she thought I said 87, and I think she filled my car with that. she ran fine on 89. a little sluggish, granted, but fine. Do I need to worry about her pinging the engine to death on the way home today? she's a sedate driver and doesn't get into boost much when she drives the car. I always over-worry, but I thought i'd ask anyways. if it's a bad thing I'll just dump a couple gallons of xylene in when I get home.

[morgie]

all i can say is that my car runs better on 87 than on 91..

[boostjunkie]

I would say that as long as you don't go into boost you should be fine. You could always run the engine for a while with all the accesories on to get rid of the gas . . .

Or do what you said with the xylene.

BTW, where did you get the xylene?

[Legacy777]

it's fine......don't sweat it.

[IggDawg]

Yeah. I drove it around and it was no big deal. pretty sluggish tho. I did a bunch of running around yesterday, and when there was about a quarter tank left I put in some 94 and a gallon of toulene . that made her happy.

boostjunkie - xylene is available at any home depot in the paint thinner section. You can only find toulene at smaller paint supply stores. it's more dangerous to humans or something, so big chains don't want to deal with the liability of it. I say go with xylene. don't run it too often tho. the only reason I chose toulene this time is because I had just run some xylene pretty recently and toulene is lower octane but easier on the plastic bits of the fuel system and engine.

blarg.

[-K-]

You only mean not to run xylene all the time right?

[IggDawg]

Yeah. Xylene is fun, certainly. but it's hard on the plastic bits. I run it when I have less thgan 10 gallons in the tank, and I figure by 2-3 trips to teh gas station at about 5 gallons a trip, I've flushed most of the stuff outa the system.

Also, I hear putting in a couple ounces of tranny fluid with a 10-12 gallon mixture of gas and toulene/xylene is a good idea.